Attracting talent

Apart from having a strategic direction and enough money to execute on the vision, the key challenge for founders is talent. Based on my experience, I will go out on a limb and say this: talent is not scarce. No matter what we hear about the “war for talent”. What is scarce is the ability to know what talent you need, find that talent, and find that talent efficiently, quickly, and affordably. This is truer still of the earliest hires, who shape your vision and your startup’s culture.

Here are some pointers based on my experiences with helping founders find people for their teams.

Making a successful hiring decision requires a process: knowing whom you seek, where they hang out, whether they see and notice your call for talent or otherwise know of your need, whether your call for talent is attractive enough, whether they are interested enough to apply or reach out, whether your hiring process confirms a mutual fit, whether you agree terms and, finally, whether they are still interested and have not been poached by a better offer in the meanwhile. This step-by-step looks obvious when one lays it down in black and white. In reality, most founders founder when it comes to hiring because they are haphazard and their follow-up is poor. Avoiding disorganised thinking and the ensuing chaotic hiring process, which can repel many a good candidate, is therefore the first thing to aim for.

The second thing is to avoid obvious and easy answers. At every step.

Most founders look in one type of spaces e.g. online startup communities or mailing lists or Slack groups. These are also spaces where your target talent is most likely to see all the other competing possibilities. Avoid being so narrow and niche. The wiser thing to do would be to tap your IRL network too. Ask the people you know who are not connected to the startup space and you may unearth several new possible candidates. As a bonus, your contacts would also have vouched for you and your startup before those candidates agree to talk to you.

People have CVs and people have side projects. These side projects in many cases provide insight into a person’s thinking as well as their skills. The obvious mistake is to not probe these side projects and thus miss possibilities. In two instances that I have been involved with, the side projects pursued by potential hires showed how those hires were perfect for the company’s international expansion plans.

Falling back on unconscious biases is another obviously easy thing to do in hiring. And avoidable. It has been shown that women get hired on proof, while men get hired for potential. If you are not finding or reaching talent of the kind you want, it would be foolish to let your unconscious biases against an entire gender make your hiring outcomes worse. Unconscious bias training goes some way not the whole way in addressing these flaws in thinking although it would be advisable for your own personal growth as a leader and entrepreneur. Emerging hiring technology could give a helping hand too. For instance, Blendoor enables merit based matching by hiding irrelevant data and thus widening your candidate pool.

Google’s chaotic hiring process in the early years has now passed into tech industry legend. It is also something best avoided and not emulated. It is crucial that founders build a creative but robust hiring process that scales, including for collecting candidate data, made simpler by platforms such as Workable, and conducting telephonic and face-to-face interviews. Equally it is important to make references as systematic and methodical as interviews themselves. Not asking meaningful questions and failing to listen actively to what the referees say is unwise, although it is easy to do cursory checks and feel you are done.

Last but not the least, avoiding firing people who aren’t a great fit is not a great move. Especially early hires, who will shape your startup’s culture, have to enable your vision and not sabotage it. If they are being disruptive or otherwise do not fit the startup, the founder has to learn to let them go. There are laws of the land that will cover firing within and outside probation periods. Of course this assumes you have given people employment contracts! It is also useful to talk to people in “exit interviews” before they leave to understand what you might have contributed to the disagreements.

Hiring is a contact sport. Putting this advice into practice will take commitment to solving the talent puzzle for your own startup.